ERROR ANALYSIS IN VIETNAMESE-ENGLISH TRANSLATION

The aim of this book is to investigate the extent to which the typological differences between Vietnamese and English influence the process of translating authentic Vietnamese sentences into English. The assumption is that Vietnamese is a topic-prominent language and the basic structure of Vietnamese manifests a topic-comment relation, rather than a subject-predicate relation. The analysis focuses on the errors made by Vietnamese EFL students when translating the dropped subject and empty elements of Vietnamese into English. This is important, given the fact that the grammatical subject is always required in English, but not in Vietnamese. Using an error analysis technique often adopted in studying the deviated forms produced by second language learners (James, 1998; Richards, 1974; Corder, 1974), the study constructs an error corpus and classifies all the errors based on the categories they belong to (linguistic, comprehension or translational) and the kind of deviation they are (addition, omission, misordering, misselection). The study provides some practical guidelines for teachers to help students deal with these types of errors.